Sunday, May 20, 2007

A sick Sunday of Poker ahead today

I imagine the fields will be huge today. Along with the conclusion of the FTOPS series on Fulltilt which is a 500+35 buy-in with a 1.5 million guaranteed prize pool, Pokerstars will be adding 100k to the prize pool of the 200+15 Sunday Warm-up which is in addition to the 350k guarantee, and will be adding 250k to the prize pool of the 200+15 Sunday Million. Pokerstars is adding this money as part of their 10 billionth hand celebration. This will almost guarantee a huge turn out for all the biggest tournaments across the sites. I unfortunately have the time to write this since I'm already out of the warm-up and the bodog 100+9 50k guarantee. I figured I'd take a few moments to enter my schedule today, which almost all will have a 5-figure prize for at least 1st if not multiple spots at the final table.

* indicates a qualifying tournament for Cardplayer's Internet Player of the year standings

Basic qualifications for CP's IPOY is 100 entrants or more, Buy-in of 100 or more, and Prize Pool of 100k of more. The sites that qualify are Pokerstars, FullTilt, UltimateBet, AbsolutePoker, and Bodog. I personally think this is a little too narrow, and I feel the minimum buy-in should be 50 and prize pool 50k. I feel like CP has the narrow qualifications to make their data mining easier on their end. As it stands, Monday thru Friday during a normal week, the only tournament across these 5 sites that everyday is the pokerstars 21:00 nightly 100k guarantee (150k guar on Wednesdays). On very freak nights, the evening 100 rebuy on pokerstars will qualify, but this is very rare. The only other weekday tournament that qualifies is the Fulltilt Monday night 1k NLH which has a 50k guarantee but regularly approaches and exceeds a prize pool of 200k. They mine as well call this Cardplayer's Yearly Internet Player of Weekend. My feelings aren't directly related to my poor standings, which some may think.

Fulltilt- 3 total tournamentsFulltilt- Monday 21:00 1k NL, Sunday 18:00 200+16 with 400k guarantee (1 sunday a month this is a 500+35 w/ 750k guarantee), Sunday 19:05 200+16 with 75k guarantee (this has been meeting the qualifications in the last few weeks so I will give it the benefit)

So under the current qualifications, there are 18 tournaments a week over the 5 sites. 3 of the sites only have 1 tournament, and I understand pokerstars is the largest site open to the entire world but they dominate this holding 12 of the 18 tournaments, which with such a small sample 67% is a huge percentage.

Total weekday entries-6Total weekend entries-12

The following tournaments would also qualify under the 50 buy-in/50k prizepool.

Bodog total- 4 added, with the initial 1 that qualified for a total of 5.

Absolute- Sunday 20:00 150+12 w/ 60k guarantee

Absolute total- 1 added, with intial 1 that qualified for a total of 2.

UltimateBet- Sunday 20:30 500+30nl w/ 75k guarantee

UltimateBet total- 1 added, with intial 1 that qualified for a total of 2. There is a slight hope that the nightly 20:30 100+9 w/ rebuys w/ 20k guarantee will eventually qualify if UB ever figures out how to get players on their site, as this is a great structure for a rebuy tourney.

FullTilt total- 7 added, with initial 3 that qualified a conservative total of 10 (remember we allowed for 2 of 7 nightly 150+13's to not hit the 50k qualification.

Pokerstars- Mon-Sat 14:00 & 20:00 100+9 w/ rebuys. Mon-Sun 15:00 50+5 which starting Monday will be known as the "daily fifty grand", as pokerstars increased it's guarentee from 25k to 50k. Saturday 13:00 300+20 nl. Sunday 19:00 100+9 double stack, this has been regularly getting 500+ runners. Occasionally a 50 rebuy will qualify, but we wont count any of them since it is not a regular occurence.

Pokerstars total- 21 added to original 12 for a total of 33.

Overall break down- 100/100- 18 tournaments a week, 50/50- 52 tournaments a week, with pokerstars still holding a dominant 63% of the total entries.

After running the numbers, maybe an average of just over 7 tournaments a day is a tad high, although I think an average of 2.5 is way to low and I think there needs to be a better between weekday and weekend tournaments. Perhaps they could come up with a system that "specific tournaments" qualified, like UB's largest daily the 20:00 120+9 bounty with 30k prize pool and maybe just the 20:00 100+9 w/ rebuys on stars instead of both daily 100+9 w/ rebuys to try and create a little more balance between sites. I'm no expert, but the current system blows in my honest opinion, especially considering how fortunate one needs to get in the majors.

So far, I've busted everything, and in pretty ugly fashion. Hopefully this will allow me to better focus on the million, which is 30 minutes in. With 10,894 runners and the 250k Pokerstars added out of their pocket, we have a $2,428,800 prizepool, which is certainly the largest prize pool ever for the 200+15 Sunday Million, and may have surpassed the largest field when a few sundays ago they put a 1.5 mill guarantee celebrating something or other. That being said, the payouts suck.

Entrants: 10,894

Spots paid: 2,619

Total Prizepool: $2,428,800

1,504th-2,619th(the bottom level)- 242.88

1st place: $229,764.48- nothin to sniff at, but only 9.46% of entire prize pool. I believe normally when they get their average 6k runners or so 1st takes home 15% of the prize pool, which would mean $364,4320. Of course when the number of players increases their pay out change, but their standard payouts for this many runners is 1,314 spots paid, with 1st collecting 12.8% which would be $310,886.40 for the winner. I'm all for paying extra spots, I understand the theorey from the sites, but I think paying 20% is plenty which would be about 2,179 spots and add $106,867.20 (4.4%) to the prize pool towards the higher spots.

Yesterday I forgot to send out a big congrats to TheFatFish A.K.A AndyMcleod for winning FTOPS event #9 the 100 rebuys and pocketing 75k. Also congrats to Imper1um on winning event #8 Friday night, the 200+16 Pot-Limit Holdem event, and pocketing 40k for his efforts.